Necessary Nomad

From the moment he discovered the guitar, around 11 years of age, down in Merimbula on the NSW South Coast, Kim Churchill was hooked – forget school, he ate, breathed and slept guitar. By the time he left school, he was committed to taking off anywhere he could find a group of people to play to – busking or whatever. Along the way, he developed an impressive two-handed playing technique that made his acoustic sound like a small band and, along the way, picked up the odd accolade – National Youth Folk Artist of the Year in 2009 and the Bluesfest busking competition winner the following year. That year also saw Churchill release his debut album, With Sword And Shield, essentially a straightforward document of where the then 20-year-old was at, all intricate fingerpicking, guitar-body percussion, harmonica and that soulful voice. Two years on and the quality of the songwriting on his new album, Detail Of Distance, has taken a significant step up from that raw debut.

“I just remember this thing Dylan said years ago and it finally hit home,” Churchill explains. “Back in Greenwich Village when he started making a name for himself, when people asked why he was doing better than some of the other people that were doing really great stuff in the Village as well, he said he thought it was because he put the song before himself – and that's what I've tried to do with this record, is really present a collection of songs rather than be a fancy guitarist or something like that.

“I had a lot to say on this record. The first one was a happy little album of sort of a quite ignorant, naïve old surfie dude who was singing songs about being happy and living in his van. Since then I feel like I've done a lot of growing up and with all the travelling and stuff I feel I like all the things I wanted to do musically were just kind of exploding, you know. That was happening internally for a while. I was writing song after song after song – in this form, in this genre, songs that were really, really heavy and needed lots of distortion and then songs that were really quiet and everything in between, so the material on the album is all incredibly different.”

At the time of this interview, Churchill is calling from The Junkyard in Maitland, which he admits, laughing, is “is probably the closest thing I've got to a home 'cause I've been playing there a fair bit… I don't really have a home. I just sort of bum from place to place.” And it's this nomadic lifestyle that has created the body of songs that have come together on Detail Of Distance.

“The last year and a half I've been travelling a ridiculous amount – more so than the year and a half before that – and I just sort of found myself in all kinds of weird places and what I really noticed about writing songs is that when I was in a certain environment, everything about a place would come out in a song without me trying to do that – and it was amazing. I really noticed how much your surroundings, on musical levels, on deeper sort of energy levels, affects the song and so the collection of songs on this record are really… In many ways for me they're kind of my sonic painting of the environment that I was in at the time and if anything, I kind of almost feel like I'm bringing back a bunch of… I mean especially coming back to Australia to tour and release the album, I feel like I'm bringing back a bunch of images of my travels, you know? And say a song like Sarah was written in West Sussex in England, because it takes me to that place when I play it now, it affects it and makes it take other people to a similar place, but it takes me to my grandmother's horse riding school in West Sussex near Chichester and green fields and tiny little pubs tucked away in villages and that kind of thing. Bathed In Black takes me to this kind of frenetic French energy of the island people in New Caledonia where I wrote that song and so each song is written in a place like that – Los Angeles in California or Montreal or Winnipeg in Canada. Detail Of Distance means a lot of things, but one of the things it's really showing is kind of, I guess, the collection of songs are, in themselves, pictures of the places I've travelled; they're musical pictures of the places I've travelled.”

It's obvious then that here's one singer/songwriter who has no trouble writing on the road. “No,” he laughs. “It really is actually the driving force, the most inspiring thing for my songwriting. I find when I stop moving to a degree that there's this stagnant feeling almost that isn't really constructive for my songwriting. Although it's good to stop for a day or two, because then you have time to reflect and look upon the things that have been happening from a sort of still moment where you can analyse them a little bit better, in general on the road is where I enjoy writing the most. In a car somewhere or in an aeroplane or in a hotel room with a couple of spare hours – all these places are sort of where all my songs come from.”

The fact that Detail Of Distance was recorded in Canada is another unexpected aspect of the impact of travel on Churchill both as songwriter and artist. 

“My first trip to Canada was where I first met the guys that run the label [Indica]. My signing to a record label was not something that I was against doing and not something I was for doing – I wasn't worried about being an independent artist – and it just kind of worked out that I did a gig in Montreal, which is where the label's based. The label itself is actually run by a Québécois political punk band called GrimSkunk – and their music's amazing too – and it just so happened that their lead singer [Franz Schuller] was at the show and was into it and got in touch. We didn't sign a deal or anything, but they booked me a couple of gigs and we had a few talks and I went and saw some of the acts that were on their label and it was all so very indie, sort of grass roots kind of stuff – not musically, but in the way they were handling things.”